It wasn’t easy. A camera, four women and Galicia that was reviving after four decades of repression and dictatorship. The objective, to film a crack, which separated the hard work of the Galician migrants in Paris from the triumphalist image that they transmitted when they returned to their hometowns in summer. Some countrymen made fun of those daring actions, it caused them “expectation and hilarity.” But the work went ahead. The film was titled Why are we marching?was signed by Grupo 4 and during 1978 and 1979 it found ways to reach the public through the distributor Rula. It was even projected by the Seminci of Valladolid. The film, an example of direct cinema according to those who have seen it, was lost. The historian Xaime Varela has reconstructed its history and that of its main promoter, Cruz Risco, a pioneer, perhaps the first Galician filmmaker.
His father was Vicente Risco, writer, member of the Cruz Martínez-Risco, the third of three brothers, was born in 1943 in Ourense, studied at the Official School of Journalism in Madrid – with the help of Fraga Iribarne, a family friend – and worked in The Voice of Asturias or on National Radio. In ’68 he traveled to London, where he survived by working in a restaurant while writing reports on regattas. “I have confirmed all this from the postcards deposited in the Risco Foundation,” explains Xaime Varela to elDiario.es, who defines the process of searching for information about Martínez–Risco as “novelesque.” His trace had faded into the footnotes of the history of cinema in Galicia.
After the English experience and a brief stay in Cannes, he settled in Paris. There he shared a home with Begoña Zanguitu, whom he had met in journalism courses. He earned money through small tasks, walking the pets of the Parisian petite bourgeoisie, for example. And he enrolled in the filmmaking department of the film school of the University of Vincennes, the famous Paris-VIII founded as an experimental center after the student and worker revolts of May 1968. It is likely that he coincided with Carlos Asorey, another Galician filmmaker. forgotten and cursed who attended to migrant communities and whose adventures Xaime Varela also rescued. In any case, Martínez-Risco studied sound engineering and soon enrolled in direct cinema adventures.
In the Carnation Revolution
He had just started his first year at Vincennes, it was 1974, and he had already embarked on a documentary about the peasant revolts against the expansion of the Larzac military base in Occitania – a decade of struggles that ended when Mitterrand came to power in coalition. with the communists and abandoned the project. A year later he worked at The fantasy museuman interview with the legendary Henri Langlois, director of the French Cinematheque, filmed by Jean Lavasse. “It is possible that Cruz Risco appears in a frame of that film,” argues Varela, in contact with friends of Lavasse himself. It would be one of the few traces in the image of the Martínez-Risco of the seventies, an almost ghostly presence in the precarious history of Galician cinema.
The fact is that also in 1975 he visited Portugal. The Revolutionary Process in Progress (PREC) had not yet ended – it will do so with the moderantist coup of November 25 of that year – and documentary filmmakers and militants from around the world – Thomas Harlan, Robert Kramer – were recording the last leftist revolution in Western Europe . A letter from Martínez-Risco to her brother Antón, older than her and an appreciable novelist in the Galician language, informs him that, along with three other people, he is filming the fall of Marcelo Caetano and the Salzarista regime and the wake of April 25. The film has disappeared but its existence has been confirmed to Varela by Begoña Zanguitu, who lived with Cruz for almost two decades. The historian also suspects that another member of the team could be Serge July, then a seasoned Maoist who had just succeeded Sartre as director of the newspaper. Liberation. Afterwards, the return to the native country.
Images of a return to the native country
In the summer of 1977 Cruz Risco, Begoña Zanguitu, Elizabeth Aguirre and Pilar Del Caz, Group 4, toured popular festivals throughout Galicia to photograph returned emigrants. “His idea was to record the contrast between how he experienced emigration in France and his exhibitionism when he returned to his towns in August,” says Varela. The film, Why are we marching?lasts half an hour and since 1978 it was screened in several of the villages where they had filmed. In Arxeriz, from A Peroxa (Ouense), for example, on a sheet hanging from the door of a stable. Upon entering the distributor Rula, the work reached short film festivals in Bilbo and Huesca or at Seminci itself. Xaime Varela has not seen her and, however, knows her in detail. “Begoña and Cruz presented it as their final year project. The movie doesn’t exist [o al menos resulta ilocalizable] but it does have a 17-page report that contains all the details,” he says. A film that exists even though its images no longer exist.
In the 80s, Martínez-Risco settled in Spain. He collaborated with Iñaki Núñez Rozados in Curfewa one-hour feature film that was seen at the Berlin Festival and was about the last people condemned to death under Franco. Political and cultural normalization triumphed and the direct, militant cinema in which it had been forged was extinguished. The filmmaker moved to Altea (Alacant), at the time a magnet for post-hippies and moderns. From that stage dates Villa Los Angelesa ten-minute short film deposited in Filmoteca Española, perhaps her only work as a director available to the public. More or less, since Varela has not been able to get the institution to allow him to view it because it is a unique copy. In Galicia he tried to film with Emilio Pérez Calviño and with Daniel Domínguez he wrote a script, River of Shadows. He helped Chano Piñeiro in Hope (1986) and in Ourense he opened a pub with friends. “But the last few years were not good for her,” maintains the historian. Her family was waiting for her for dinner on Christmas Eve 1992, but she did not arrive. She was found dead in her apartment in Ourense.
Xaime Varela recently related his research at the permanent Seminar on Gender Communication directed by the filmmaker and academic Margarita Ledo at the University of Santiago. In a few months he will do it at the Vicente Risco Foundation and then he will write it. Until now there were hardly any mentions of Cruz Martínez-Risco in Documents for the history of cinema in Galicia 1970–1990 (1992) by Manuel González and Group 4 in the detailed thesis by Xan Gómez Viñas Do amateur ao militant: political and aesthetic implications of cinema in non-professional format in Galiza in the 70s (2015). “She was modern in her actions and dressing in a city like Ourense. I imagine that this caused their invisibility. She was a pioneer, perhaps the first female Galician filmmaker,” she concludes.
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